Unleaded, Unleaded, Premium Unleaded, by Eric Graham

As promised, 20x200 is back with fresh new editions this week. Tuesday is fine art day, and today's edition comes to us from Eric Graham, a Texas-raised, Brooklyn-dwelling painter.

The edition is a reproduction of Unleaded, Unleaded, Premium Unleaded, an original oil on linen painting measuring 36"x48". The print is available in 3 sizes, printed with archival pigment inks on a nice hefty 100% cotton rag matte paper. They'll be available at 20x200 at 2pm EST today:

8.5"x11"
Edition of 200 each $20.

17"x22"
Edition of 20 each $200.

30"x40"
Edition of 2 each $2000.

I found Eric online over the Summer, before 20x200 was something I could show people. I spent many a late night perusing the virtual flat files of arts organizations. White Columns, Artists Space and The Drawing Center registered hundreds of page views from me in the wee hours of the morning. I am an intrepid surfer and am fascinated how emerging artists present their work. I am also an insomniac and have considerable patience for sifting through sand to find gold. I bookmarked artists like mad and sent out a lot of emails saying "Hey, we're working on this thing and it's going to be cool and would you do an edition with us?" The email was considerably more verbose than that, as economy of words is not my forte. (As if you hadn't noticed that by now...) Regardless, Eric was game and I was glad.

Eric explores themes very similar to the vernacular photography I have a love/hate relationship with. If you look on his site you'll see parking lots, dusty small towns, billboards and gas stations. These are subjects I've shown and looked at over and over as photographs.

Seeing them as paintings, specifically Eric's paintings, made them new again. His subjects are adrift, or perhaps engulfed by negative space, rendered in flat, even tones. It's hard to decide whether these places and things are falling back into the abyss or being enshrined, which seems a perfect metaphor for Americans' ambivalence towards the decaying 20th century icons he depicts.

Like Tema's Palm Aire photograph, this gas station makes me nostalgic for a version of the country that I never really lived in. It's a roadside attraction, its decay making it that much more picturesque. But if you look at it long enough, it becomes more, as all good artwork should - my own train of thought takes me from a mom and pop station to a multi-national conglomerate, and the imagined cars the station fuels carry people ever further from the centers of their towns, off into that flat, even abyss Eric's created on the canvas. That's the story I tell myself, Eric's might be different and you are free to create your own.

We're back tomorrow with a photo from another JB favorite - see you then!